“Bigot” is a favorite epithet for same-sex marriage supporters to bandy about regarding their opponents. It’s used as a synonym for “hater,” “homophobe,” and “racist emulator.”
Yet according to dictionary.com, bigotry is “stubborn and complete intolerance of any creed, belief, or opinion that differs from one’s own.
By that definition, the LGBT community is actually more bigoted than its opponents.
Consider recent clashes between First Amendment protections and state laws outlawing discrimination based on sexual orientation. Some business owners who oppose same-sex marriage – from photographers to web designers to cake decorators – turn away same-sex couples. Most of these companies happily help out individual gay people and offer referrals for gay weddings. Some customers, being intolerant of beliefs that differ from their own, sue anyway and usually win, forcing the company either to comply or to face fines and possible loss of their livelihoods.
Such situations go well beyond recent disputes about requiring small business’s insurance plans to provide contraception the owners morally oppose. They involve not only the First Amendment’s free-exercise clause, but also its promise of free expression. The state and the LGBT community must not be allowed to compel people’s creative activities — it evokes the USSR’s encouragement of Socialist Realism. Am I saying these lawsuits are un-American? Yes.
A New Mexico photographer’s case appears headed for the U.S. Supreme Court. It directly addresses whether a non-discrimination statute outweighs the First Amendment’s free-speech guarantee. To me it’s a no brainer: a mere statute versus perhaps the most important sentence in the entire Constitution? Yet three New Mexico courts ruled the other way.
The freedom not to express ideas one finds odious is somewhat established in law. For example, in 1977, the Supreme Court ruled that Jehovah’s Witnesses who objected to New Hampshire’s “Live Free or Die” license plates had a right “to hold a point of view different from the majority and to refuse to foster an idea they find morally objectionable.”
The instant LGBT retort to the free-speech argument tends to be: “But you wouldn’t allow similar discrimination against black people.” Well, African-Americans are a legally protected class, while gays are not. Further, people of different races are, essentially, the same. Men and women (and, I believe, mothers and fathers) are not essentially the same. If sex differences were irrelevant, the L and G of LGBT would disappear.
Sure, Americans disagree whether a child ideally needs both a mother and a father. Intolerance of same-sex couples raising children, though, is melting away – only Mississippi and Utah still ban same-sex adoption. Yet intolerance toward even preferring the traditional family format has accelerated.
Gay advocates push a double standard. Before gay marriage, the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network published a lesson plan describing marriage as a union of “any two people” building a family. Nobody objected. But after same-sex marriage started spreading across the country, many LGBT people endorsed disciplining or firing public school teachers who present marriage as the union of a man and a woman. That kind of unidirectional open-mindedness, too, is bigotry.
LGBT stubbornness also shows up in day-to-day interactions. A gay friend of mine once mentioned something about a man’s “husband.” Later in the conversation I referred to the man’s “partner.” My friend sharply retorted: “Husband!”
I felt challenged either to switch sides temporarily in the gay marriage controversy or to engage in an ill-timed debate that could hurt the friendship. Note that I didn’t cut short his initial use of “husband” with my own “partner!” because I tolerate beliefs different from mine. My friend? Not so much.
Many LGBT people believe that in 100 years, preferring the traditional family structure will be like saying doctors are men and senators are white. But that’s not in the cards. Mothers and fathers will still have essential but different roles in raising children. Not all Americans of faith will turn into Episcopalians and Reform Jews; rather, many will move the other way. The Bible’s text isn’t going to change, nor will everyone embrace the textual gymnastics found in books like “What the Bible Really Says about Homosexuality” and “God vs. Gay? The Religious Case for Equality.”
To paraphrase a popular early 1990s gay slogan: We’re here. We believe in traditional marriage.
Get used to it.
David Benkof is the author, as David Bianco, of “Gay Essentials: Facts for your Queer Brain” (Alyson, 1999). He can be reached at DavidBenkof@gmail.com.
